﻿Chinese Cooking Methods - Delicious Meals For Food Lovers

With various Chinese cooking methods available nowadays, food lovers have explored a new cuisine platform in the culinary arts arena. These methods give the chefs and cooks a perfect blend of colours, aromas, essence, and food qualities of the Chinese food culture. The mostly basic food ingredients stay the same, the preparation technique is the difference in the preparation of food recipes. Each food item may be prepared in various ways by adopting different styles of cooking.

A lot of the basic activities of Chinese Cooking Methods could be highlighted as boiling, frying, braising, stewing, sautéing, steaming, simmering and smoking. In Chinese Cooking Methods frying plays a key role and is considered one of the most important activities in every recipe. This might be further classified as slippery-frying, deep-frying and fast-frying. Also the method has many parameters for cooking which depends which ingredient is used. For instance, to keep meat flavourful and juicy, frying is opted; while in case of Vegetables frying helps to make them crispy. As a quick food preparation the speed of these Chinese Cooking Methods becomes an important factor while preparing these Chinese dishes where all the ingredients are swiftly stirred and then fried.

Sautéing or shallow-cooking is the other common activity of the Chinese cooking method. Sautéing uses a lot less oil than the deep-frying technique and need lower temperatures than stir-frying. Sautéing is done on both sides or on one single side. In sautéing, the foods items are browned slowly in oil. As a result the food gets softer from inside and crispier from outside. Sautéing is generally followed by sauce making. Stewing, boiling, braising and simmering are some of the other Chinese cooking methods used for cooking food. In parboiling the chopped and washed ingredients are put in a big pot in which they can easily float. All the ingredients are then cooked over high heat. Slow and prolonged boiling destroys the flavour as well as the nutritional value of the food to some extent. To avoid this, many of the cooking is usually done with the help of slow simmering heat as it helps maintain the nutritional value.

Smoking and Cold Mixing activities of Chinese Cooking Methods, involve food items that are precooked while in roasting the marinated raw ingredients are seasoned before barbecuing over direct heat. Whereas Cold Mixing is done with parboiled or scalded ingredients mixed in salads and then chilled just before serving. Finally the poaching technique is a technique where the ingredients are cooked in liquid just below the boiling point. This method is especially recommended for cooking delicate fish, where the fish is cooked till the meat becomes tender. Lastly these Chinese cooking methods are just the few methods to make Chinese cooking and food a real treat for food lovers.

Christine Gray is a recognized authority on the subject of Cooking. Her website Cooking Smarter provides a wealth of information on everything you will need to know about Chinese Cooking. All rights reserved. Articles may be reprinted as long as the content and links remains intact and unchanged.